New Expanded Edition: Bernard MacLaverty

Richard Rankin Russell

2025
222 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684485611
Contemporary Irish Writers

This newly updated and expanded paperback edition of the first monograph in English on Northern Ireland-born Bernard MacLaverty discusses his fiction in its aesthetic, cultural, religious, and political contexts. Richard Rankin Russell emphasizes MacLaverty's dialectic of imprisonment versus freedom, the latter represented by love. Love in the earlier fiction is often perverted, whether in the name of family or Irish nationalism, but after the publication of the novel Cal (1983), its manifestations become more positive and characters are able to escape various forms of imprisonment. Russell identifies three distinct phases of MacLaverty's career - the visual, the sonic, and a blending of the two - and concludes by showing how MacLaverty's style, humor, and values enable his deeply humane fiction to model human community. Attentive to language and theoretically well informed, each chapter of this enterprising book analyzes a particular short story collection or novel, and also explores the salient features of MacLaverty's fiction generally.

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Reviews
"This newly updated version of Richard Rankin Russell's pioneering study combines heartfelt appreciation for the artistry of Bernard MacLaverty's fiction with discerning critical assessment of its moral complexities and historical contexts. Russell makes a compelling case for MacLaverty as contemporary Northern Ireland's preeminent novelist and storywriter." ~David Holdeman, coeditor of W. B. Yeats in Context

"This revised, expanded, and thoroughly up-to-date edition of Richard Rankin Russell's volume remains the indispensable companion - and compass - for any serious student of MacLaverty's creative works." ~Richard Haslam, associate professor, Saint Joseph's University

"Bernard MacLaverty has remained creative and productive as a writer well into old age, so Richard Rankin Russell has updated his classic study of MacLaverty's fiction to take account of his most recent novel and collection of short stories. Fittingly, this new edition's sections on Midwinter Break and Blank Pages are among its highlights." ~Marilynn Richtarik, author of Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland

"This full-length study of a very popular and well-regarded Irish writer is lively, comprehensive, and critically acute: it is an admirable account of MacLaverty's art." ~George Watson, professor of Irish literature, University of Aberdeen

About the author:

RICHARD RANKIN RUSSELL is a professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press